Krebs on Security

In-depth security news and investigation

Posts Tagged: firegen.com

Amid the hustle and bustle of the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week, researchers at RSA released a startling report that received very little press coverage relative to its overall importance. The report detailed a malware campaign that piggybacked on a popular piece of software used by system administrators at some of the nation’s largest companies. Incredibly, the report did not name the affected software, and the vendor in question has apparently chosen to bury its breach disclosure. This post is an attempt to remedy that.

The RSA report detailed the threat from a malware operation the company dubbed “Kingslayer.” According to RSA, the attackers compromised the Web site of a company that sells software to help Windows system administrators better parse and understand Windows event logs. RSA said the site hosting the event log management software was only compromised for two weeks — from April 9, 2015 to April 25, 2015 — but that the intrusion was likely far more severe than the short duration of the intrusion suggests.

That’s because in addition to compromising the download page for this software package, the attackers also hacked the company’s software update server, meaning any company that already had the software installed prior to the site compromise would likely have automatically downloaded the compromised version when the software regularly checked for available updates (as it was designed to do).

Image: RSA

RSA said that in April 2016 it “sinkholed” or took control over the Web site that the malware used as a control server — oraclesoft[dot]net — and from there they were able to see indicators of which organizations might still be running the backdoored software. According to RSA, the victims included five major defense contractors; four major telecommunications providers; 10+ western military organizations; more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies; 24 banks and financial institutions; and at least 45 higher educational institutions.

RSA declined to name the software vendor whose site was compromised, but said the company issued a security notification on its Web site on June 30, 2016 and updated the notice on July 17, 2016 at RSA’s request following findings from further investigation into a defense contractor’s network. RSA also noted that the victim software firm had a domain name ending in “.net,” and that the product in question was installed as a Windows installer package file (.msi).

Using that information, it wasn’t super difficult to find the product in question. An Internet search for the terms “event log security notification april 2015” turns up a breach notification from June 30, 2016 about a software package called EVlog, produced by an Altair Technologies Ltd. in Mississauga, Ontario. The timeline mentioned in the breach notification exactly matches the timeline laid out in the RSA report.

As far as breach disclosures go, this one is about the lamest I’ve ever seen given the sheer number of companies that Altair Technologies lists on its site as subscribers to eventid.net, an online service tied to EVlog. I could not locate a single link to this advisory anywhere on the company’s site, nor could I find evidence that Altair Technologies had made any effort via social media or elsewhere to call attention to the security advisory; it is simply buried in the site. A screenshot of the original, much shorter, version of that notice is here. Continue reading →